Agriculture is a main source of income for the majority of Ugandans and employs the biggest percentage of the country’s population both directly and indirectly. However, agriculture faces a great range of challengeswhich include price ignorance, inaccessibility to market as farmers only focus on markets close to them. This could be affected by surplus in supply, ignorance or inadequate information about climate and soil types which support particular agricultural activities.
As FGD Services, we have designed a graphical directory for farmer and farm services, farmers represented on the map, may have their hands raised, a hand raised implies a farmer has a produce to supply, the farmer details including the type of produce and animal the farmer has is present on the map, as one hovers over a farmer.
AgroAid App
AgroAid App and System has been designed in a way to enable users choose language of preference as they navigate through. Languages so far deployed are English, Luganda, Swahili French and Portuguese. For the first time interacting with the system, the user is required to register with just a phone number and password. This is to ease usability especially with rural farmers who may not have an email.
Users are also tasked to choose the line of agriculture they operate i.e. either crops or animals and then specify the crops and or animals they deal in. For each animal or crop selected, a farmer is required to feed in how old the crops or animals are. Using the period entered, the AgroAid system is able to provide information on the recommended farming practices, likely diseases and Pests. A farmer is able to read in detail about each disease, its causes, how to treat and prevent them. He or she is able to read more farming practices and farming systems.
AgroAid has a number of listed Agronomists and Extension workers whom a farmer can ably reach out to through voice call or audios, chat and video calls. The application also comes with a Farmers Forum where subscribed farmers can interact, share their experiences, challenges and advice. The application also comes with a 7 days’ weather updates to help farmers plan ahead of unfavorable conditions. The Application has a Market Intelligence module to help farmers make Market decisions using Artificial Intelligence. Based on the farmer’s location, the application will provide the price at which the given crop or animal product is sold in the nearest market places.
Smart Crop Calendar
In developing countries, the agricultural sectors lag behind in regard to leveraging technology as an enabler to foster smarter farming and bumper harvests. This is largely because farmers do not have access to information and also there is a lack of important infrastructure to effect better decision making in the agricultural sector that is based on available evidence aggregated by collected data. This makes it harder for stakeholders within the sector to make informed decisions. The majority of the people in developing countries are small scale farmers and they lack information about climatic changes, crop calendar, when to irrigate and so on. At the national level, there’s a lack of accurate data about climatic changes. The agricultural practices by farmers to some extent influence the climatic changes; therefore, there is need for continuous collection and monitoring of data from the fields.
Therefore, this project aims primarily to improve data collection by use of various sensors (soil moisture sensors, soil water content and threshold, heat sensors), reduce on-farm resource wastage, to save money, and improve yields using IOT wireless precision irrigation.
Some of the solutions providers. From left to right: Christine Kihunde, AgroAid – Joseph Gibusiwa, FGD Services – Brian Peter Kazibwe, Smart Crop Calendar
Users are also tasked to choose the line of agriculture they operate i.e. either crops or animals and then specify the crops and or animals they deal in. For each animal or crop selected, a farmer is required to feed in how old the crops or animals are. Using the period entered, the AgroAid system is able to provide information on the recommended farming practices, likely diseases and Pests. A farmer is able to read in detail about each disease, its causes, how to treat and prevent them. He or she is able to read more farming practices and farming systems.
AgroAid has a number of listed Agronomists and Extension workers whom a farmer can ably reach out to through voice call or audios, chat and video calls. The application also comes with a Farmers Forum where subscribed farmers can interact, share their experiences, challenges and advice. The application also comes with a 7 days’ weather updates to help farmers plan ahead of unfavorable conditions. The Application has a Market Intelligence module to help farmers make Market decisions using Artificial Intelligence. Based on the farmer’s location, the application will provide the price at which the given crop or animal product is sold in the nearest market places.
Smart Crop Calendar
In developing countries, the agricultural sectors lag behind in regard to leveraging technology as an enabler to foster smarter farming and bumper harvests. This is largely because farmers do not have access to information and also there is a lack of important infrastructure to effect better decision making in the agricultural sector that is based on available evidence aggregated by collected data. This makes it harder for stakeholders within the sector to make informed decisions. The majority of the people in developing countries are small scale farmers and they lack information about climatic changes, crop calendar, when to irrigate and so on. At the national level, there’s a lack of accurate data about climatic changes. The agricultural practices by farmers to some extent influence the climatic changes; therefore, there is need for continuous collection and monitoring of data from the fields.
Therefore, this project aims primarily to improve data collection by use of various sensors (soil moisture sensors, soil water content and threshold, heat sensors), reduce on-farm resource wastage, to save money, and improve yields using IOT wireless precision irrigation.
